The Exit - Void Deck (3)

 

Last night after supper the regular chat with Arthur back home, an hour at Feidu tidying files and a couple of corrections. Down on the deck at the bottom of Block 2 returning the women's card game was underway on one of the tables. Each block had their own round concrete table, about 900mm diameter, with checkers squares embossed on the surface sometimes and ringed by six stub seats. Card games, dining and drinking tables, and sleeping platforms sometimes too. For some reason the men at Block 2 preferred their own fold-out table in an inner corner against a wall for their games, with their own soft plastic stools brought down. From the newspapers one knew rowdy drinkers sometimes gathered on the void decks and police had to be called. Young lovers sometimes claimed the rounds, sitting on the edge of the seats in order to snuggle close. Foreign workers taking their lunch and dinner were sometimes found at the tables. (More often the workers would sit against a wall on the deck itself, the greaseproof paper spread between their legs. The tables were not really intended for their use.) On the return last night there was something that looked like shredded tissue paper on the desk in the room. Strands of orange pith possibly left from the night before. Or else pigeon droppings somehow deposited through the window. During outings the windows were left slightly ajar in the way Doreen advised—not too wide, otherwise at that height the afternoon breeze could create havoc indoors. The friable material and the tang in the air soon established the matter: it was ash from the burning of the paper money from a funeral down on the deck. They were burning a lot of it, Doreen confirmed. It was the money alright; not gas or anything else in the air. Not to worry. The fourth or fifth funeral in the neighbourhood in these five weeks. Once more the deceased was unknown to Dor. (Three or four times Doreen had been encountered on the path downstairs, on each occasion needing to be hailed because of her dead-walk through the grounds. Many of the passersby walked blind like that; neighbours were often unknown to each other.) Ten flights up the ash had risen through the windows, both the far room and the louvered adjacent bathroom. (The windows to Doreen's own room were recessed a little and sat safely beneath a narrow concrete ledge.) Before the casket downstairs a male pictured in his sixties stood in a frame, clothing effigy draped on the chair in the usual manner. Two or three mornings ago the yellow tenting had been erected, evidently the man dying late week within C section of Block 2. Early mornings the mechanical sound of an unoiled pulley or wheel could be heard outside the windows on the east side. Some days before the brooding pigeons on the ledge below the kitchen window had been identified; a mystery that had taken a little longer to figure.